Short-term traffic flow prediction based on a hybrid optimization algorithm

• A robust method is proposed to alleviate the effect of traffic data with outliers. • A comprehensive traffic flow prediction indicator system is established in this paper. • We hybridize polynomial and Gaussian kernel to build nonlinear version of our method. • Parameters of the proposed method are optimized by Fruit Fly Optimization Algorithm. A novel least squares twin support vector regression method is proposed based on the robust L 1 -norm distance to alleviate the negative effect of traffic data with outliers. Although there is some known work for the short-term traffic flow prediction problems, their efficacy depends heavily on the collected traffic data, which are often affected by various external factors ( e.g. weather, traffic jam or accident), leading to errors and missing data. This makes it difficult to pick an effective method that accurately predicts the traffic state. As a contribution of this paper, an iterative algorithm is designed to solve the non-smooth L 1 -norm terms of our method; its convergence also proved. Further, a comprehensive traffic flow indicator system based on speed, traffic flow, occupancy and ample degree is utilized in this paper. We also extend the proposed method to a nonlinear version by hybridizing the polynomial kernel and radial basis function kernel, where the weight coefficient of hybrid kernel is determined by the change tendency of traffic data. To promote the prediction performance, the parameters of our nonlinear method are optimized by adaptive fruit fly optimization algorithm. Extensive experiments on real traffic data are performed to evaluate our model. The results indicate that the newly constructed model yields better prediction performance and robustness than other models in various experimental settings.